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named Joan.
    This sounds nothing at all like the memoir of a famous, or infamous, Confederate general. I pray that it is unlike such writings in every way. This is the record of a man finished with war. I spend my days in our house, or walking the fragrant wet streets, louche with jasmine and camellias and gardenias and unnameable strange rambling vines winking their purple and red and yellow blossoms at the sun. I spend my nights reading to children and holding my wife to my broken and amputated body. Ten years ago I would have thought such behavior foolish. What joys does a poor man have? These days there is love, to begin with, and also the possibility of salvation. I am the rich man who discarded (or, more accurately,
lost
) his riches. Perhaps I will know a savior now. Perhaps it is Anna Marie. Perhaps it is my own conscience.
    Does this seem small, this new world I describe? It is not, but judge for yourself.
    I write this on October 3, 1878. Anna Marie is pregnant. Again. That itself is something of a miracle. Last spring I thought I would never touch her again, never be allowed into that bed, never see her smile at me. I didn’t care. But much has changed, even in just a few months.
    I should begin by telling you how I met the woman with whom I now live in blessed penury.

    I was not such a chastened man ten years ago, no sir. I lived in red upholstered rooms high above the Vieux Carré, and in the mornings I received admirers in the lobby of the St. Louis. I did not drink on those mornings, sitting by the tall windows and talking the history of the late war with twiggy-limbed and swarthy Frenchmen whose closest encounters with the rage of battle happened right there, during the occupation, when their women were insulted by the Union occupiers and they plotted their imagined duels and sword thrusts over boiled shrimps and morning brandy in the clubs.
It was outrageous,
they told me.
It was intolerable
.
    “And yet you are here, you must have tolerated,” I jested.
    “We are a resourceful and proud race,” they said, very seriously.
    I entertained offers of business partnerships on those days. I could have been a railroad investor, a restaurateur, an importer of West Indian cloth, a brothel owner, an investor in Mrs. Pontalba’s apartment houses around Jackson Square, a maker of fine rum, and a partner in a firm that pumped water out of the city and into the river. I turned them all down, although I could picture myself ruling my own restaurant, tasting the soups, watching the butchering of the tender and giant green turtles, listening to the woody ping of fine knives chopped down on hard blocks. I could imagine inspecting the cleanliness of my plates.
    But it was cotton I chose. I cared nothing for the crop, there is no romance in cotton, only the seas of white monotony. But I reckoned myself a clever man, cleverer than everyone else, and I knew cotton was the clever man’s bet. Cotton factoring—the brokering of cotton between farmer, shipper, and manufacturer—would be my business, though I knew nothing of it or, truthfully, about any business at all.
    What did it matter? Men respected and admired me for being the General. Few could have named a single battle I’d engaged, a single victory, but no matter. I was a man to whom attention must be paid, and I felt capable of all things.
    I hired men who knew cotton and installed our offices in the Vieux Carré, close by the wharf with a view over the river to Algiers. Not once in the three years of my proprietorship did I set eyes on a cotton boll. Cotton never came through the door except on the backs of men and in their handkerchiefs. I let the others concern themselves with the product.
    I spent my time writing letters on fine letterhead to my West Point classmates requesting their help as I began the composition of my war memoir. I thought I would call it
Advance and Retreat
, which was both simple and complete, as was my life. I had been a titan of battle,